The development of object recognition methods for service robotics is in progress. An autonomous mobile robot that autonomously moves in an environment requires the skill to recognize objects existing in its surrounding environment and to determine what they are in order to implement high-level interaction with those objects. Non-patent documents 1 to 3 and Patent document 1 disclose object recognition techniques in the related art.
In particular, Non-patent document 1 discloses a vision-based object recognition technique. In Non-patent document 1, an object is recognized based on SIFT features by using images taken by a normal camera. According to the vision-based object recognition technique disclosed in Non-patent documents 1, object recognition can be performed in a short time. Furthermore, it is possible to achieve robust object recognition even in partially occluded scenes.
Non-patent document 2 discloses an object recognition technique based on contours. In Non-patent document 2, an object is recognized based on 200D (200-dimensional) feature vectors for the entire object by using a single range image. In Non-patent document 2, the learning and classification of an object using the 200D feature vectors are carried out by a support vector machine. According to Non-patent document 2, the object recognition technique disclosed therein can achieve very fast calculation for the object recognition.
Non-patent document 3 discloses an object recognition technique using spin images (3D features). In Non-patent document 3, an object is recognized based on high-dimensional features that are extracted from 3D (three-dimensional) point clouds according to the normal direction of the object surface. It should be noted that points in the 3D data are mostly obtained by a laser sensor. According to Non-patent document 3, the object recognition technique disclosed therein can recognize an object independent of the viewpoint (i.e., invariant with regard to viewing pose).
Furthermore, Patent document 1 discloses a 3D position detection apparatus capable of recognizing a reference surface by using both a 3D position sensor and a range sensor.